THE Socialist Republic of Vietnam declared its independence on Sept 2, 1945. The declaration came at the tail end of a famine which began in 1944. The famine still haunts the consciousness of many who were alive then. An estimated two million Vietnamese, or 10 per cent of the population then, died during the famine. By comparison, three million Vietnamese were killed during the Second Indochina War, from 1954 to 1975.
The causes of the famine are hardly in dispute. In 1940, the Japanese army occupied Vietnam but left Vichy France in charge of its administration. By the terms of the May 1941 Franco-Japanese treaty, French Indochina had to supply grains to Japan. From 1941 to 1944, Vietnam supplied 700,000 to 1.3 million tonnes of padi and maize to Japan, roughly equivalent to 50 to 80 per cent of its grain production. And a fairly significant acreage was forced into the production of jute, hemp, cotton and castor-oil plants - also for Japan - thus reducing food production. The wartime destruction of roads and other transport infrastructure made it difficult to transport excess food from southern Vietnam to the north. What ensued was tantamount to genocide.
Many victims walked long distances to provincial capitals, and thousands marched on the capital, Hanoi. Survivors resident there then tell of long lines of ghost-like figures trooping into the city. Hanoi families often found corpses in front of their homes. Huge pits were dug in rural areas near Hanoi for mass burials. The wages paid to burial workers went down by the day, and in Hanoi people were soon burying bodies just for a bowl of gruel. The dead in rural areas were left in the open to rot because people did not have the strength to bury them.
Extreme conditions drove many people to extreme behaviour. The vomit of one became the food of another. People followed horses and oxen to eat the dung or to search for the occasional undigested pieces of food in the dung. Food in the mouth was not necessarily secure, because there were frequent fights to force food out of mouths. People stole, robbed and killed for food. One family that made cakes for sale reports how it made cakes from earth to guard against theft. Customers would pay for the earth cakes and redeem them for real ones later elsewhere. There are stories of how infants were eaten up by hungry dogs. Parents would leave their children at home to go look for food, only to find blood and bones in cribs when they returned.
Vietnam has not set aside a special day in the year to remember the victims of the 1945 famine. The narrative of Vietnam's independence and reunification often mentions only in passing this dastardly crime inflicted on the Vietnamese.
What purpose would a special day serve? Food security has again become a matter of concern. Vietnam is now the second top rice-exporter in the world. The government enforced a suspension of rice exports earlier in the year, but it has been lifted since. Then there are the higher frequency and intensity of natural disasters that strike Vietnam every year, in particular the typhoons that bring flooding, damaging crops and harvests.
Still, in a global economy, Vietnam's obligations to export rice must be observed but remembering the famine will encourage people to plan for a rainy day. Steady growth over the past two decades has brought about levels of consumption that are unreal and even unsustainable. Vietnam now has only US $20.7 billion (S $29.4 billion) in reserves, roughly equivalent to the government's annual budget. One day, the good life will come to an end and the Vietnamese will wonder where all the money has gone.
The Vietnamese government should think about how the entire country, not least the government itself, can put aside more in reserves - not just in money but also in kind - in times of abundance. It should think too of a more comprehensive scheme of security, especially food security.
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